Larry Kramer - Faggots

The liberation of sexuality from the bonds of moralism has left in its wake a crying need for principled, intelligent, vigorous explorations of how a genuine morality can be introduced to our newly minted freedom. This exploration is a central part of Kramers historically significant literary work, of which Faggots constitutes an important beginning and a key. As a documentation of an era, as a savage and savagely funny social parody, as a cry in the wilderness, and as a prescient, accurate reading of the writing on the wall, the novel is peerless and utterly necessary. It is brilliant, bellicose, contemptuous, compassionate andas is true of everything Kramer writesbehind its delectable, entertaining, sometimes maddening harshness is a profoundly moving plea for justice and for love. There are few books in modern gay fiction, or modern fiction for that matter, that must be read. Faggots is certainly one of them.

Tony Kushner

Since his screenplay for D. H. Lawrences Women in Love in 1969, Larry Kramer has been a prophet of psychic health and catastrophe among usa prophet unmatched for the accuracy of his omens and the reliability of his anathemas and remedies. His uncannily foresighted novel Faggots appeared in 1978 just as the AIDS virus flooded whole wings of the American bloodstream; now its Swiftian portrait of an all but vanished subculture stands as that cultures visible memorial. His later plays have been clear as firebells, memorable as tracer bullets.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters citation, May 1996

[ Faggots ] sends up New Yorks self-imposed gay ghetto, doing for its gyms, discos, orgy rooms, army fatigues, mustaches, and advertising agencies what Portnoys Complaint did for Mom and masturbation. Faggots is the Uncle Toms Cabin for homosexual men whose worst oppression is their lack of courage to change the way they live.

Library Journal

A corrosive study of the gay underbelly of New York Faggots has the air of a Restoration comedy in its mix of Baroque style and bawdy, scathing humor.

Womens Wear Daily

A book of major historical importancethe first contemporary novel to chronicle gay life with unsparing honesty and wild humor. Larry Kramer has changed the way we think about gay men. He is one of our great humanists.

Erica Jong

Writing as always from an affirmatively homosexual point of view, Kramer in this novel conveys a sense of premonitory unease, even foreboding, about the spread of promiscuity, sadomasochism and narcotics among the homosexual population. more graphic than James Baldwin or Hubert Selby.

Times Literary Supplement (London)

It would come to resemble her, Picasso said of his Stein portraitand so with Kramers of New York gay life, which I had thought so entertaining, so extravagant, ever so preposterous a lustrum ago. It has come to resemble us, in tragic guise, but with tremendous application to our discordant truth: Faggots is still the mirror we must look into, fun house or carnal houseit shows the man.

Richard Howard

Faggots struck a chord. It exuded a sense that gay men could do better if they understood themselves as fully human, if they could shed their self-loathing and self-deception. I loved it.

Andrew Sullivan

Faggots

Larry Kramer

Faggots

With an Introduction by Reynolds Price

Grove Press

New York

Copyright 1978 by Larry Kramer

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic. Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Originally published by Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kramer, Larry.
Faggots /Larry Kramer.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-55584-667-1
1. Gay menFiction. I. Title.
PS3561.R252 F3 2000
813'.54dc21 00024178

Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

This book is for:
Arthur and Alice Kramer;
William H. Gillespie;
and Sam Klagsbrun.

And for Davidour book.

the ancients located the deeper emotions in the bowels.

Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags

Contents

Larry Kramers Faggots

an Introduction by Reynolds Price

T he success of any satire is gauged by the degree of offense it provokes at its initial appearance and by the durability of that offense. Larry Kramers novel Faggots a tragedy within a comedywas published in 1978 to mixed cries of praise, thanks, and execration from the community it portrayed. These decades later, anyone who searches out present-day responses on the Internet will quickly find that the wounds inflicted by Faggots are burning still. The fact that The New York Times did not notice the novel at its publication is yet another clear sign of successjust or unjust, the book was truly outrageous; and the gray mechanics of popular culture were prepared to ignore its existence. It has, nonetheless, proven far too healthy to bow to contumely and oblivion; and it continues to be a stumbling block for many. Thats a distinction that very few serious novels, of any era, can claim.

In retrospect, what was even more remarkable about Kramers voice in 1978 was that his long yet astonishingly controlled crya cry that, to many, seemed puritan and self-loathingwas in fact a prophecy of a sort thats virtually impossible to match in the prior history of satire in English. Certainly the most famous of twentieth-century satiresGeorge Orwells widely known visions of universal totalitarianism and Communismhave proved deceptive. Perhaps only the muffled Russian overtones of approaching social and spiritual disaster in Gogols Lost Souls or the late novels of Dostoevsky provide parallels, and even they were less precise than the vision that Kramer so relentlessly embodied in his crowded spectacle.

To glance at his subject first, howeveranyone who experienced, or closely observed, the American and European male homosexual revolution of the 1970s and early 1980s can confirm an all but incredible fact. Kramers account of American queer culture in those years is far more nearly literal history than heightened reality (the merely accurate and nonjudgmental word queer has always felt right to me, though the misleading and now appallingly ironic gay has triumphed). The books first extended set piecethe teeming party/orgy at Garfield Toyes apartmentchimes with more than one episode which I knew of; and the climactic sequence at Fire Island only condenses into the arc of a single weekend the substance of straight-faced reports (with only minor stretches) that were available, in those days, from the soberest veterans and the hardest-core pornographic films.

What central error in that world, then, did Kramer perceive; and what descending reality did he come to dread so ominously that it compelled him to write, not a sermon or a sociological study but a novel as full of laughter as woe? It would be easy to say, as more than one of Kramers characters does, that the frenzied sexual activity which the male body so readily proved capable of performing made the stated goal of much of that activity literally impossibleif the goal, that is, was love or psychic intimacy between men of good sense and reasonable vigor.